Journal ryanr's Journal: iBook/OS X update 4
So, several of you may recall my whining about trying to get used to OS X on this iBook I have. One of the things I was holding judgement on was how more RAM would affect things.
So, a couple of days ago, I got the more ram. I went from 384MB to 1.25GB (256-on board, swapped 128MB stick for 1GB stick. RAM is now maxed out.)
Funny story about that. "Funny" as in "Ha Ha, I have to add some Apple hardware enginner to the list of People Who Have To Die now." So, the RAM had arrived last week from Crucial. Tried to install it, iBook beeps at me. Well crud, tried a few things, decide I got a bad stick, we send it back. Get replacement, install it, and I try it without buttoning the iBook back up. Which means I'm running with the keyboard flopped over, etc.. I get it to boot twice with no problems. Yay! I got a good stick this time, I thought.
So I close it back up, and it beeps at me! Damn! OK, wasted a bunch of time blowing the P-RAM, clock circuit, NVRAM reset, check firmware revision, etc... no dice.
I get to thinking a little, and I try it again with the covers off. It boots. Hmm. I examine the old stick and the new one. New one is a double-sided DIMM, old one is single sided. The old one has the bare side up... and so it has an extra milimeter of clearance or so on the top.
Electrical contact? No, I see the little metal cage that goes over the RAM (and under the AirPort card) has a plastic strip to specifically prevent that problem.
I think to hold the DIMM down a tiny bit with my finger. Aha! Beeps at me. Try it without pushing on it, it boots fine.
At least I know what it is now. The extra set of chips on the new DIMM makes it bend down those extra couple of degrees, and I get flakey contact.
Some purposeful reseating and bending of little metal cage later, and I have a working machine with all the RAM. Yay!
So, good news, some of the slower items are now faster. I get the SPOD a lot less often.
But not entirely gone. And some things are still way slow. The example that is most clear is pogo.com, which is my wife's favorite game site. it consistently drives the CPU to 100% and stays there, and the games get really slow. I think they use mostly Java apps. bad JVM implementation? I'm using Firefox, and no idea what JVM.
One really shouldn't have to have that much RAM to get things to run decently. To be fair, XP kinda sucks air sometimes with less than 512MB, too.
I've also found that Thunderbird's Ctrl-T is Cmd-T, and Cntrl-Enter is Cmd-Enter. Just like I should have guessed. I'll get used to that eventually.
Edit: Oh, forgot! DarwinPorts is pretty cool, and I've had an opportunity to help with a couple of them a tiny bit. Also, Thunderbird has been a little crashy. Mostly on the pogo.com site, mentioned before.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oh, you meant *Java* is slow! (Score:2)
It wasn't just Java before the RAM upgrade. There were cases when it would take 4-5 seconds to change windows, and things like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Oh, you meant *Java* is slow! (Score:2)
Yeah, I'd get the SPOD, and it would just ignore me for switching windows. I'm in the habit of using Cmd-Tab. I haven't caught it doing it since the RAM upgrade.
Now, I DO do some silly RAM-eating things, like run Thunderbird with a couple hundred thousand saved emails. And run Firefox. I know they are pigs. But it's the same (general) codebase and same datasets as I was using on my dearly-departed XP Home machine that had 384MB of RAM. The latter wa